Not dead yet

Predictions about the demise of the ‘Book Launch’ ritual may have been unduly pessimistic. Nearly three years ago, in one of my first blog posts, I referred to an article in the ASA magazine Australian Author by Miriam Cosic, who saw book launches as an endangered species, ‘one of the silent casualties of shrinking profits and digital publishing,’ and remarked that publishers and even some writers doubted their value.

But since then this traditional way of celebrating the issue of a new title seems to have had a comeback, at least here in Perth, especially for publications by small presses. Last year’s launch event for my novel The Mind’s Own Place brought together a cheerful crowd and resulted in a good number of sales on the night, thanks in large measure to the efforts of UWA Publishing stalwarts Terri-ann White and Charlotte Guest.

And in the last week I’ve attended two very successful launch events organised by other Perth-based publishers.

Andrew at his book launch (Centre for Stories, Northbridge)

Margaret River Press has made its first venture into poetry with the release of Andrew Taylor’s 16th selection, Impossible Preludes: Poems 2008-2014. Fellow-poet Dennis Haskell launched the book eloquently at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge, and it was a thoroughly pleasant occasion. I’ve known Andrew well and admired his poetry for more than forty years. I reviewed one of his early books way back in 1973, co-founded with him in 1975 the still-running Adelaide institution known as Friendly Street Poets, co-edited an anthology with him in 1978, and so on… It’s been a long association, beginning when we were appointed simultaneously to junior academic positions in Adelaide and continuing when we both moved (separately) to senior academic positions in Perth more than 20 years later. We’ve kept in contact with each other’s writing. So I was delighted to be present for last week’s celebration of his new book. It contains many beautiful lyrics – often witty, sometimes poignant, always with an unforced conversational directness.

A couple of evenings ago I went along to another lively launch: David Whish-Wilson’s third crime novel, Old Scores, published by Fremantle Press. My friendship with Dave doesn’t have such a long history. His non-fiction book Perth attracted my respectful attention in 2014, and then we met last year when he accepted my invitation to join a panel of respondents following my public lecture as the 2015 Battye Memorial Fellow. Soon afterwards we were both guests of the Kimberley Writers Festival, and now we’ve become followers of each other’s work. Old Scores, which evokes the notoriously bad mad corrupt days of Perth and Fremantle in the early 1980s, was launched in an amusing speech by tyro parliamentarian Josh Wilson (a writer himself). The venue was a tradition-soaked Freo watering hole, The Buffalo Club. I’m glad to see that this novel features again the private investigator Frank Swann, who was at the centre of Dave’s previous novel Zero at the Bone, a fast-moving, gripping, tough-as-nails story that gave me plenty of enjoyment.

Good luck to these books, and to their authors – and long life to the launching ritual!